The following is adapted from my opening remarks at World IA Day Seattle 2016, which took place on Saturday, February 20. The theme for World IA Day this year was: Information Everywhere, Architects Everywhere.

If you’ve been around the information management world for any length of time, you’ve probably heard the joke about the old fish and the young fish. The old fish says “Water’s fine today”. And the young fish says, “What’s water?”

I didn’t say it was a good joke.

But it is useful as a shorthand for explaining something about what information is. We’re like the fish, obviously, and information is all around us. We’re swimming in it, but we don’t even notice it until we learn to see it.

How much information did you encounter last week? This morning? Since you started reading this? I’ll bet you couldn’t quantify the amount of information around you on any time scale. The room you’re in is information, the street outside, the words you’re reading, the clothes we’re wearing… every sight, smell, sound, and surface carries information, and we process it all in an instant and without even noticing that we’re doing it.

We live in a universe of information. And most of the time we can, like the young fish, just swim in it and go about the business of being. But sometimes, we want to shape and form information into something intentional and meaningful, into a web site, an intranet, an app, a monument, or some other information experience. At those moments, when information is both the medium and the message, we must notice the information all around us and attempt to make it meaningful to ourselves and others. We must apply design. We must practice information architecture.

Now, I imagine a variation of the joke about the fish where in this version the old fish says to the young fish: “I’m a fish.” And the young fish says, “What’s a fish?”

It’s still not a good joke.

But I think we encounter something like this when we try to explain to our friends, family, colleagues, and bosses that we’re information architects. When I tell someone I’m an information architect, I get something of a blank stare. For the longest time I tried to figure out how to break through that and come up with a cool way of explaining what I do (“I’m like a ninja, but with information.”), but I’m starting to lose hope that I’ll come up with the right words.

After all, everyone’s something of an information architect. Everyone organizes something: closets, movie collections, garages, files on the computer, kitchens, bookshelves… you name it. We all try to impose some sort of order on the world, to create systems that make sense and keep on making sense, and impart some sort of meaning to others. We’re all fish. I mean, we’re all architects.

It’s just that, for those of us who are crazy enough to voluntarily identify ourselves as “information architects”, we’re doing more than organizing our spice racks or shoe closets. We are doing the same thing, essentially, except we’re attempting to do it at scale. We’re trying to impose order on thousands and millions of items of information at a time, for users who may number in millions or billions. And these days we’re usually trying to do it within a window the size of an index card.

And there’s something so interesting about that to me. It seems like a fraught enterprise: doomed yet noble, and occasionally elegant and beautiful. There is information everywhere. And there are architects everywhere. But the rare breed who call themselves information architects are lucky enough to recognize these things; to understand that this is water, and we are fish.

It’s really hard to get people to understand why it’s worth investing in metadata and taxonomy projects. The benefits aren’t immediate and the reasons can seem esoteric. It’s only after the work is done that the usefulness of metadata starts to become clear.

Proof of this comes in this interview with a colleague of mine at REI. This is a quote I’m going to pull out at every metadata and taxonomy meeting from now on:

“[Collecting metadata] turned out to be really smart. We didn’t realize the repercussions of it when we did it. But the structured way we captured the meta-data and user-generated content (UGC) laid the groundwork for how we use that content.” (My emphasis.)

I had nothing to do with the decision to collect metadata in this instance, but I’ve seen firsthand the powerful unintended benefits of having robust structured content. Perhaps one way to convince others ahead of time that they should invest in proper content markup is to collect more testimonials and stories like these. If you know of any others, let me know in the comments.

In my opinion, IA is not something that needs to be sold. IA is already inherent to whatever someone is working on or has in place. If you are making something, you will be tackling the IA within and around it. With or without me you will “do IA.”

I guess in sales speak we could say “IA is included for free in all projects” — because a system without an information architecture does not exist. Rather than selling information architecture, I find that I do have to “explain” what it is and why it matters so that it can be worked on and improved upon (not ignored or inherited which is all too often the case)

Whether you’re interested in “selling” IA or not, the fact is you’ll probably have to explain what you do to others. Probably multiple times. Per day. You could do worse than have a few of Abby’s scripts memorized.

There’s so much good stuff in this post by Christian Buckley. It’s about enterprise collaboration, but his points apply to issues of findability generally. The central idea that sticks out to me: context is key to findability, and social interactions are great sources of contextual cues. As Buckley points out, though, context is mostly missing from modern search and navigation.

I also love this comment from Steven Flinn summing up the different modes of finding:

Follow — when you are aware of sources of generally relevant information

Search — when you are aware that you have a need for some information now, but don’t know where it is

Discovery (i.e., recommendations) — when you have a need for some information now, but are not even aware you need it and/or that it exists.

In the end, there is a lot to learn from this massive social experiment. Your friend circle and impulsive actions such as ‘likes’ cannot predict what you want to read. Indiscriminate sharing is a bad idea. A large social network isn’t the best way to find information.

Last week I attended the IA Summit in Baltimore. It was my first IA Summit and I’m very glad I decided to go. I met so many intelligent, thoughtful, and passionate practitioners (and academics) of information architecture, and I found myself inspired and challenged to raise my game and do better work.

The following are some of my rough notes from the five days of the conference. While this is short on narrative, I hope there are enough nuggets of wisdom and links to explore that you’ll find something new to think about.

Themes

Some of the major concepts that kept cropping up for me:

Information Ecosystems

Information Ecologies

We need better tools

The new spirit of IA is, as Christian Crumlish put it: Third Wave IA – or Resmini-Hinton-Arango IA – the high level stuff; what is this, what does it do, what is going on in the user’s brain?

Quotes

“We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.” – Marshall McLuhan

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Andrea Resmini introduced the day by putting the current information ecology in perspective for us. We have moved from a world where computing was done in a specific time and place to a world where computing is ever-present. “Cyberspace is not a place you go to but rather a layer tightly integrated into the world around us.”

For example, the average citizen in the EU spends 29.5 hours computing each week. The average citizen in the UK spends 39 hours computing each week.

The day was structured around groups of Ignite-style talks, with discussion and an exercise after each.

Talks for Part 1

David Fiorito: The Cultural Dimensions Of Information Architecture.

Culture is a learned and shared way of living; we are creating culture through IA

Structured content refers to information or content that has been broken down and classified using metadata.

broken down into discrete concepts

classified as real world things and relationships

metadata: a structure readable by robots and people

Knowledge rejects rigid structure.

When we use the same language to describe the same things, we can build a web of knowledge across various services.

Structured content breaks down information into things and the relationships between them. A content model maps our subject domain, not our website structure or content inventory. Assertions distinguish between real-world things and the documents that refer to them.

Experts map the world, users mark points of interest.

Modeling begins with research, talking to experts and users to understand and articulate the subject. Ubiquitous language describes the granular terms that will be used by everyone on the project. Boundary objects show where your subject model can connect to neighboring models.

Content is hard.

Everything starts with good content. Content is not the stuff we pour into nicely designed containers. It’s not the stuff we chase up from the client at the last moment. It is not a placeholder. Content is the whole damn point.

“Do what you do best, and link to the rest.” -Jeff Jarvis

The link forces specialization and specialization demands quality

Other parts of your organization may be sitting on a goldmine of content or business data. Find it and exploit it.

This was a rich and thought-provoking talk, but difficult to summarize. The major themes were:

Complexity

Multiplicity

Postdigital

Architecture

There is a new spirit. It’s not towards order but towards disorder and multiplicity A spirit of context, place and meaningA spirit of sense-making, … and creating new places for humans to work and play

Big governance vs, local governanceThere’s a lot of stuff happening at the local [organizational] level, but few people if anyone who are looking at the overall picture.

There are usually political barriers to solving information problems on sites. They’re not IA problems.

The governance of your web: Your “stable environment” equals clear sponsorship, goals, and accountability.Your “good genes” are goals are policy-driven, standards-based frameworkThese things will allow your web to grow and still be recognizable as your web. That’s all it is.